Classic Kiwi vowel conundrum: Son #4 unsure whether football teammate’s name (having never seen it written down) is Calvin or Kelvin. Maybe we should have a River Calvin running through Glasgow. Maybe we do… 🧐
‘For this Alaskan river…the sixteenth century has not yet ended, nor the fifteenth, nor the fifth.’ A passage of prose running as clear as the river he describes. John Angus McPhee. What a writer.
Hard to believe this is McPhee’s first book. Prose is stunningly effective without being flashy. Shows how a big part of style is just having something worth saying and knowing what it is you want to say…
How lovely is Joan Hassall’s wood engraving for Eric Linklater’s ‘Sealskin Trousers’ (which is, incidentally, one of the great Scottish short stories)…?
Reading Garry Disher & just loving his style. Would simply never occur to me to put a sentence together the way some of these are constructed. In context, the sentence ‘Hirsch shifted in his chair: love, embarrassment, compassion, cynicism’ is just so spare & resonant & perfect👌
You click on one of these McInnes interviews and you know he’s gonna be thoughtful, measured, realistic, ambitious. Absolutely delighted this guy’s at the helm…
Here’s an awesome, long-form review of White Rural Rage by the political scientist Nicholas F. Jacobs in Politico this morning. Jacobs digs into fresh issues with the book that I didn’t cover, and he offers a sober and constructive look at rural politics!